Add movement to your photos with Photoshop timelines

WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT if photographs could move? Photoshop contains a Timeline tool to create animations from your photos, and can export each one as a video file.

The method uses the standard Photoshop tools—such as Layers, Opacity, and dragging handles to move and transform—and isn’t that difficult to get the hang of. It uses a system of keyframes, where you specify what you want the beginning and end of an animated sequence to look like, and Photoshop automatically animates between these points. You can have as many or as few keyframes as you like, making your animation more complex, or a simple fade-away, like Marty’s photograph in BacktotheFuture.

What Photoshop isn’t is a full-fledged video editor, and while you can import media into the timeline, it’s designed for creating animations from still image layers, so don’t go expecting to use it to edit your masterpiece. More advanced users can add Layer Masks, so some elements of their animation appear to pass behind others, still visible through any gaps, but here we’re going to explore the basics of the system.

1 CHOOSE YOUR VICTIM Start by selecting a photo that has a clear subject and a background that’s not too distracting. It needs a subject that’s going to be easy to cut out. Crop the image to a 16:9 aspect ratio if you like; we’re going to be exporting as video at the end of this. Select around your subject—we used the Quick Selection tool, followed by Select and Mask (“Select > Select and Mask”)—remembering to get the little internal bits where you can see through to the background, too [ Image A]. Copy your subject to a new layer with “Layer > New Layer Via Copy,” hide the new layer by using the eye icon to the right of its entry in the Layers palette, then set about removing your subject from the background. 2

BRUSH AWAY THE SUBJECT This isn’t as easy as it seems. You might get lucky and be able to use Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill (“Edit > Fill,” select “Content Aware” from the drop-down). We weren’t, so resorted to the Spot Healing tool, which is itself content aware, but operates over much smaller areas, working in small strokes from the edge of the subject [ Image B]. If this doesn’t work, try the Healing and Rubber Stamp tools, which require you to designate a source area before painting over your target. Watch out for repeated features in the background caused by using a source area—these look completely unnatural. You can use the Spot Healing brush to smooth them away if they appear.

3 ENTER THE TIMELINE Once your background is complete, with no evidence that there ever was a subject there, double-click the Background layer to turn it into Layer 0, or give it a name. This is a good time to save your work as a PSD file. Then head to the “Window” menu and choose “Timeline.” A timeline appears at the bottom of your window, with nothing in it but a button that says “Create Video Timeline.” Click it. Each of your layers now has its own space on the timeline, which by default is five seconds long [ Image C]. 4 CHANGE THE POSITION Drop down the little arrow at the right of each layer on the timeline, and you’ll see options for

“Position,” “Opacity,” and “Style” [ Image D]. These are the parts you can animate. Select “Position” for your subject layer, and you’ll see a yellow diamond appear on the right. This lets you add a keyframe, and you’ll see it appear on the timeline as another yellow diamond if you click it. To make your subject move, drag the playhead (the blue triangle with the red line descending from it) to the other end of the timeline, and select the Move tool. Move your subject to where you want it to be at the end of the short animation, and a new keyframe is added at the position you left the playhead.

5 FADING AWAY Test it out by pressing the play button at the left of the timeline. You should see your subject glide smoothly across between the two keyframe positions. Opacity works in a similar way [ Image E]. With the playhead at the left, leave the opacity at 100%, and add a keyframe. Drag it to the right, and change the layer’s opacity in the Layers palette to 50%, and a keyframe appears. Drag it further to the right, change opacity to 0%, and you get another keyframe. Play it now, and as your subject moves, it fades away.

6 CHANGE THE SIZE If you want to make something larger or smaller, you need to change the layer you want to transform into a Smart Object by right-clicking it in the Layers palette, and choosing the option. Now, in the timeline, “Position” has been replaced by “Transform” [ Image F]. Add a keyframe at the beginning, then drag the playhead to the right, select “Transform,” use the controls much like “Free Transform” in the main Photoshop interface, commit the changes, and you get a keyframe. So, we can now make our subject move, fade, shrink, and rotate, all with automatic keyframes.

7 GO BACK AND FIX IT If you’re not happy with anything you’ve done, take the playhead to the keyframe you want to change (or you can jump between keyframes using the little black arrows at the extreme left), make changes, commit them, and the keyframe is updated. “Undo” and the History palette still work on the timeline, so you can roll back your mistakes.

8 EXPORT TO A FILE Saving your video means rendering it first, because you’ve been watching a preview all this time—you might have noticed pixelation. Head to the “File” menu and choose “Export > Render video.” You get an options box in which you can set the codec used and the dimensions [ Image G]. This is where cropping to 16:9 comes in handy, because you can resize it to 1920x1080 precisely. Rendering takes a few moments—it’s only five seconds, after all—and is faster the more powerful your CPU.